As we mentioned on the previous page, the hard drive and optical drive installation are completely screw-less making installation a doddle. I've got rather large hands, but I didn't encounter any problems installing parts. With previous Shuttle's I have had problems with installation to the extent where I've actually cut myself trying to get my fingers in to parts of the chassis where they shouldn't really go.

The drive cage also slides out without the need for any screws - this is secured in place when the hard drive directly above it is installed. If you want to install your main hard drive at the rear of the case, be sure to leave the clips for the drive above the cage installed - they hold the drive cage in place.

It is really hard to describe just how easy installation was, although if I was forced to pick words they would be 'faultless' and 'simple'. The only time that we required a screwdriver was to install and remove the ICE cooling solution. It's amazingly simple to create a completely screw-less design, but I've never seen one quite as good as the P-series design - it's absolutely superb.

The ICE cooling solution is a little different to the one that is included with the ST20G5, mainly because of where the CPU is located in this chassis. We've briefly mentioned that this design pulls air across the front of the case from left to right. You've already seen the large 80mm fan on the left hand side, but there's a second 60mm fan located on the opposite side of the heatsink.

This means that the heatsink fan combination moves air in a push-pull fashion. Incidentally, the 60mm fans in this case do not mean that the case is noisy. We found that the case was generally very quiet and the smart fan implementation seems to be configured in a slightly better way in comparison to previous efforts. In older P-series chassis', we've experienced times where the fan would spin up and down because the CPU temperature was sat on one of the temperature thresholds - it is good to see that this problem is fixed.

The BIOS

In general, the BIOS is pretty good. It is based on the Phoenix AwardBIOS, which is popular among many motherboard manufacturers. There is all of the necessary control over the chipset, allowing you to enable or disable the many integrated peripherals as you please. The is a comprehensive set of memory timings available to the end user, including CAS, TRCD, TRP and TRAS. However, we found that the TRAS setting was not working correctly when we tried to configure it - we believe that this will be fixed in a BIOS update.

Also, there is a reasonable selection for CPU voltages and clock settings. The CPU voltage is adjustable from 0.825v all the way up to 1.5875v in 0.0025v increments, the memory voltage is adjustable from 1.9v to 2.1v in 0.1v increments and the chipset voltage is adjustable from 1.7v to 2.1v in 0.2v increments. The CPU clock speed can be adjusted from 133MHz all the way up to 355MHz in 1MHz increments and there is also adjustment for the CPU clock ratio, should your CPU be unlocked.

There are two different fan configurations on the PC Health Status screen - one controls the CPU fan, while the second controls the system fans at the back of the chassis. There are 6 modes for the CPU fan, and four for the system fans. Ultra-Low, Low, Mid and Full Fan Speeds are common on both fan speed selectors and the CPU fan setting also has Smart Fan and eXtreme PC modes too.